jwz(_at_)mozilla(_dot_)org (Jamie Zawinski) wrote on 20.08.98 in
<35DC6BCC(_dot_)7476C883(_at_)mozilla(_dot_)org>:
Chris Newman wrote:
In hindsight, we should have developed a markup language using tricks like
_italics_, *bold* and >excerpt for email, so that the markup language
itself would be plain text. Even that would require style-run merging,
but it probably would have worked. Unfortunately, it's too late to
introduce something like that now.
Brad Templeton (I think) proposed something like that years and years
ago, and came to the conclusion that it didn't really work. Then later
Well, AFAICT ist's used very successfully in a local BBS network. I think
there exist numerous clients that don't do too bad a job of parsing it.
It's not perfect, but it sure beats both nothing and HTML. *And*, since
it's (A) so easy to create and parse manually, and (B) lots of people
already use it manually, _it is already deployed_!
(And my current client does convert four instances in this mail into
highlighted text (not that much it can do with DOS text mode), for
example.)
I wonder if it would be useful to write up an informational RFC on that
...
MfG Kai